The .museum top-level domain (TLD) has been created to provide verifiable means for recognizing domain names used by bona fide museums, their professional associations, and individual members of the museum profession. Special subdomains are available for virtual museums and other aspects of museum activity conducted by agencies that do not operate physical museums. The varying needs of registrants are best met by a flexible system with as few mandated constraints as possible. In keeping with this, although there generally must be at least three labels in any subdomain designation (specific.generic.museum) there are no plans for setting a maximum number of labels in a name that a registrant may select. Subject to the provisions listed below and the technical limitations of the Domain Name System (DNS), a registrant hold a name of any length with as many component labels as appears purposeful. That is, it is permissible to have a name in the general form:
somelabel.anotherlabel.yetanotherlabel.enoughlabels.museum
Registrants are encouraged to select names that are as directly informative as possible. This will serve the public interest and will provide a broad name space in which as many entities as possible may register their desired designations. A museum well known as the "Thisville Motorcycle Museum", currently operating the Internet domain thismm.org, might be better served by registering thisville.motorcycle.museum than by simply transferring its previous domain from .org to .museum.
It is not possible to foresee the scope of overlap in the domain names that will be requested. Although simply adopting the principle of first-come, first-served would reduce the headache of TLD administration, basic policy has been focused on satisfying two simultaneous requirements. The first is establishing means for having the largest possible segment of the museum community happy with the names of their .museum domains. Pleasing one museum by giving it art.museum, while disappointing thousands of others equally entitled to the same name, is not consistent with this goal.
The second requirement is providing the public with as much information as may be possible in a domain name. The TLD .museum indicates a resource maintained by a bona fide museum. It would be desirable if the remainder of the domain name could provide at least a useful hint about the more specific identity of the museum in question.
Although the attractive nature of registering directly on the second level is fully recognized (myorganization.museum) restraints will be placed on the use of that level. Individual museums will be registered on the third and lower levels, in second-level domains that indicate their location and/or disciplinary affiliations, or use some other generic concept(s) with which they are associated. The Toontown Portrait Museum might therefore wish to register both toontown.portrait.museum and portrait.toontown.museum, thus ensuring that it would be included in any listing of either portrait museums or museums in Toontown.
Virtual museums operated independently of physical museums may register on the third or lower levels in .virtual.museum as, for example, snazzoid.virtual.museum. Virtual museums operated by physical museums may elect to register in a similar manner as, say, toontown.portrait.virtual.museum, and/or indicate their virtual activity in a subdomain of their physical identity, virtualstuff.toontown.portrait.museum. Labels other than virtual that unambiguously indicate virtuality may also be accepted on the second level.
Although it is unclear how what is termed the "John Smith problem" may be solved, a similar niche will be provided for individual members of the museum profession as firstname.lastname.professional.museum. Other labels that unambiguously indicate individual professional status may also be accepted on the second level.
The present text provides a narrative accompaniment to a structured series of Naming Conventions. These were initially based on a preemptive analysis of what might be necessary to establish viable and purposeful naming conventions for the .museum TLD and are regularly modified in response to feedback from the user community. It will not be possible to determine how well all this will mesh with the reality of domain operation until significant experience has been acquired in the latter regard.
Of particular interest is determining if the set of generic, location and disciplinary labels that prospective registrants are requesting can be used as a controlled vocabulary to support an index of the names registered in .museum. There is an initial implementation of a public index and direct entry may also be made into subheadings. For example, listing of all entities registered under art.museum will be returned if this is entered in a Web browser.
If a shared second level does not prove viable, a basis for relaxing the requirement for generic labels may be considered. Although it is expected that a majority of registrants would benefit from the flexibility provided by this subdivision of namespace, any organization that is interested in setting its sights on the future possibility of direct second-level registration would be well-advised to request a name using third and lower level labels that would likely prove globally unique if subsequently migrated upward one level. The name utterlyuniquename.history.museum would not become ambiguous if the second-level label were removed. The name metropolis.science.museum would not survive the same transition but would remain viable if the leftmost dot were removed.
A significant source of confusion about domain names results from the fact that the leftmost label in a domain name often designates an individual computer, or "host", rather than an administrative subset of a network domain. For example, the label WWW most often indicates a specific Web server and, when used as such, is not a subdomain label in the same sense as the higher-level labels in the full domain name. The distinction is not entirely unambiguous but is significant. Consider, for example, a case where the registrant of ourplace.science.museum wishes both to operate a Web site and receive e-mail within this domain. The Web site might well be named www.ourplace.science.museum but the organization's e-mail addresses would not be in the form some.user@www.ourplace.science.museum. They would be some.user@ourplace.science.museum or perhaps some.user@mail.ourplace.science.museum.
It is the shared component of all these forms that should be seen as the domain name. For the purpose of registration in .museum, any label designating a service (WWW, FTP, MAIL, NS, etc.) will not be counted as one of the three labels in the specific.generic.museum model described above. It may, however, be possible to create a unique three-label domain name for a museum without any single label being specific. The location.discipline.museum might easily be unique, as could the.locationname.museum. In other situations, such as the.disciplinename.museum, it might be necessary to use a fourth label (or a different form) to establish adequate differentiation.
Although the word museum is used in many languages, it will not always naturally be placed at the end of an organization's regular name. There will, therefore, sometimes be a degree of redundancy in the meaning that may be ascribed to individual labels in the same domain name. This is an unavoidable consequence of the formal structure of the DNS which, in any case, only has a coincidental resemblance to natural language.
3 February 2003 - 0900 UTC